by Laura McNeal
“English paper,” I said.
For a while, I studied. I read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” found two examples of alliteration, and explained “how they added to the tone.” Then, after wondering for some time what it would be like to live in the tree house, all alone, in Mexico or Guatemala, I climbed down, extracted my bicycle from a spidery part of the Wallaces’ shed, pushed it along a gravel drive that was well out of my mother’s sight, and rode to the river.
I’d never been there so late in the day, when the light was orange and gnats hung in nameless constellations. In certain parts of the woods, the oldest, biggest trees were burnt to charcoal from past fires, but they’d sprouted soft leaves and young white branches. Vines crept up and over them, a hundred feet into the air. I always felt when I reached these huge shrouded rooms that I’d found my way to a foreign country, a secret wilderness into which I could disappear.
Where the river flowed past Amiel’s house, I tightened the backpack that held the components of my plan to show him a mime who’d become famous for doing what Amiel could do. I looked around for joggers, hikers, and dogs but saw only gnats, tadpoles, and a wary duck.
I plunged knee deep into the water and slogged across. I could hardly hear the bubbling-babbling current over my pulse. The river seemed colder, my legs wobbled, and the thicket suddenly had a forbidding look. What if Amiel protected himself with a handmade ax? What if he didn’t live alone? I blundered toward the silvery lattice of driftwood and stopped to consider what I would do if a completely different illegal immigrant was sitting there with a gun.
Maybe I should call Greenie and hang up so police could trace the origin of my last and final phone call, I thought.
I was just about to do this when I saw a person standing on the branch of a sycamore ten feet away.
It was Amiel.
He wasn’t holding an ax, and his feet were bare. He didn’t smile when he saw that I’d discovered his hiding place but watched me with what looked like the hope that I would go away. He just stood in the tree and waited. Everything incredibly stupid about my plan—the movie in my backpack, my heavy laptop, the bicycle I would have to ride home in the dark on a winding road afterward—revealed itself.
And yet I blundered on. “I wanted to show you something,” I said.
If he understood me, he gave no sign. He didn’t nod. He didn’t climb down. The sun was at the vanishing point beyond us, a final glimmering orangeness in the west. I looked behind me and saw only reeds—no hikers or joggers or dogs. I knelt on the sand and unzipped the backpack. I removed the computer and set it on my lap. Then I fumbled with cases and buttons until I made the silvery-black images of Les Enfants du Paradis move across the screen. I turned on the Spanish subtitles and tilted the screen so that it faced Amiel up in the tree.
The look on Amiel’s face was less forbidding now. The sun went out in a single breath and I shivered, the sand already cold against my knees. In the light that was now turquoise, he looked at me and the screen with what might have been curiosity or just acceptance that I wasn’t going to disappear. He jumped down from the tree and walked over to me. He didn’t say hello in any language. I felt a stroke of fear like I used to feel as a child when I knew I had pushed my father too far. Amiel reached for the computer, closed it, and the pale silver light of the movie went out.
As I sat on the sand with the closed-up theater on my knees, foolish and ashamed, he walked away from me. I wondered where his bicycle was. I wondered if he had cooked and eaten his dinner and if he ever felt safe enough to take off all his clothes and bathe in the river. The world around us was so beautifully blue-green and sharp that such things seemed natural and ideal, better and purer than my life at home. His bare feet sank in the white sand and his shirt glowed a little in the twilight. I knew I needed to hike out while I could still find the path back, but I watched until he disappeared behind the pile of branches that was his wall. He’d gone into his house without speaking to me.
There was nothing to do, really, but put everything away as quickly as possible and run home.
I turned around one last time and saw him watching me. There was enough light to see his face, but not his expression.
“Sorry,” I said. Did he want to talk to me but couldn’t? Or shouldn’t, like Robby said? I remembered Robby asking if Amiel could mime hanging himself, and for some reason, I lifted my hand up in a fist like I was holding a noose around my neck, and then I acted like I was hanging myself. I thought Amiel smiled, but it was so dark I couldn’t be sure.
I turned around and whacked my way through the reeds until I stood on the tiny beach. I felt an unexpected dread of the slow-moving water, darker now. It was the same shallow current, of course, holding the same shy creatures, but I was afraid. I told myself to be sensible, and I forced one foot into the water, then the other. I sloshed through in a kind of terror until I found myself on the other side. At first I had no need of my flashlight, but the trees formed a tunnel that was darker than the open spaces. I shined the light chaotically on the ground and up nearby trunks and then down again to make sure I could see any spiders that might have suspended their webs across the path. For a while, I made good time among the unfamiliar cracking sounds and spiky shadows. I heard owls and pictured mountain lions. I heard mice and thought coyotes. Somehow I came to the place where I had to walk along a fallen log to cross the water and told myself it was just like the balance beam and that it wasn’t quite dark yet, not black dark, and the log bridge was at least a sycamore, so it was white. I shone my flashlight down on the log, started toward it, tripped on the mud bank, and fell. I cried out too loudly and hysterically, I’m sure, for the injury itself. It was just a scrape on my shin and my hand. I heard footsteps behind me and felt hands on my arms, which shot new fear through me before I turned and saw that it was Amiel. He had followed so quietly I hadn’t heard him.
“You scared me,” I said. I wanted to grab hold of him, but I just sat there. I thought that if I held still, he would leave his hands on my arms, but he didn’t. He let go.
He gestured for me to stand up, and I did. I brushed feebly at my dusty shorts and glanced at my shin, which throbbed. There was nothing impressive about the scrape, unfortunately. I could see only a needle-fine slash of blood in the darkness.
He made another gesture for me to follow him, and he led me over the log, reaching back for my hand when I was nearly to the end. It was just gallantry; he dropped my hand again when I stepped off the log. Without speaking or accepting my offer of the flashlight, he led me swiftly out of the riverbed, and as we came to the meadow that lay just inside the trailhead, the moon came up. It wasn’t quite full, but it looked huge above us. The fennel plants trembled and a bat twitched through the sky.
“Thank you,” I said. “Gracias.”
He neither nodded nor shook his head. He leaned down and snapped off a tiny piece of an aloe plant, squeezed it, and then rubbed the blob of cold aloe on the scraped part of my shin. He stood up again and wiped the rest of the aloe on his pant leg. Though he’d just done something kind, I felt the distance between us the way, in science class, I sometimes felt the uncrossable space between planets.
He turned away and I heard, for a second or two, his light footsteps on the path. Whether he waited for me to unlock my bike and ride away, watching over me still, or whether he ran immediately back to his house in the woods I couldn’t tell. He was too familiar with a life in hiding to let me know his position in the darkness.
I had a light on my bicycle, but that was just because my mother, my father, and I had once, when we were a normal, von Trappish family, taken our bicycles on camping trips and ridden along safe, carless paths to the ice cream stand. At no time in my life had I ever been permitted to ride my bike on Mission Road, where most things that couldn’t go forty miles per hour—possums, squirrels, dogs, cats, coyotes, snakes, and rabbits—were promptly killed. It being Sunday night, there weren’t many cars, but the ones that were on the r
oad were screaming. Twice, cars flew by so close a rush of air pushed me slightly sideways, and I swore I would never, never do this again.
I decided I would hide the bicycle by Robby’s tree house. If my mother was awake—and surely she would be—I would say I fell asleep in the tree house. Looking back, I see that I was beginning my practice with lies, preparing unconsciously for the day four months in the future when the fire would jump from tree to tree and roof to roof and I would head straight to the woods, to Amiel, to a house no fireman would think to defend but where all that I had come to love was in danger of burning alive.
Nineteen
I was too optimistic about my mother. She had checked the tree house. Repeatedly. She was waiting for me in a murderous mood.
“Where were you?”
“Greenie’s.”
“I called her.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, in a vain attempt to bluff her.
“Where was Greenie, then, when she answered the phone?”
It didn’t seem likely that I could guess this. “Okay. So I wasn’t with her.”
“The truth this time.”
“I went for a bike ride.”
“IN THE DARK?”
“I used the headlight.”
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into you.”
I expected her to say it was my father’s fault. She thought it, I suppose. What she said was that we were going to be spending a lot of time together. I was no longer grounded but Siamesed. For the remainder of my sentence, whenever I was not in school, I was going to be with her. All. The. Time.
“Fine,” I said indifferently. It’s harder for someone to punish you when you don’t react. I went into Lavar’s junky (but clean) bathroom, closed the door without slamming it, and started the bathwater. I stared at the plume of rust that went down the white enamel from the faucet to the drain, flipping at the still-cold water with my hand, and wondered what Amiel was doing now and if he had light of some kind in his house. I studied the stinging, shaved-off part of my shin. The aloe still glistened there, and I touched it carefully. I brought the trace of aloe to my nose to see if it had a smell, but it didn’t, so I held my finger under the running water with the hope that I could wash away my longing.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were sensationally long and boring, containing one conversation of note between Robby and me at school.
“I talked to Mary Beth last night,” he said in his excessively casual way.
I tried to keep doing my geometry homework. “In person or on the phone?”
“Phone. I asked if she wanted to come over and swim.”
Write out the formula for the perimeter of a triangle urged my book. “Is your dad gone or something?” I asked. Isolate variable x.
“No,” Robby said. “He’s not gone. But that’s why I asked her over. It was a test.”
“Oh,” I said. “Super-clever.”
“Thanks. She failed because she said she had to study for a biology test.”
“Well, she does go to college,” I told him. “She could study from time to time.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. So I asked her what was going to be on the test.” He lifted his chin in that weird way guys do when they’re chin-waving at each other. “It turns out she’s kind of smart.”
He began to describe the biological concept of the chimera, which is the freaky real-world version of the mythological chimera: a monster made of different animals. While my lunch period floated away, he talked about gametes and zygotes and how a mule wasn’t a true chimera and a hinny wasn’t a true chimera (a hinny being a cross between a stallion and a jenny, whatever a “jenny” is), but a geep was.
“A geep?”
“Yes. Apparently, in 1984, a chimeric geep was made by combining embryos from a goat and a sheep.”
“She told you that?”
“Well, no. I looked it up after we talked. But she talked intelligently about gametes and zygotes.”
“How romantic.”
“In another situation, maybe.”
“So do you like her or what, Robby?”
“Mais non, ma cousine. I couldn’t like someone who had affairs with married men. The main thing is to get her to like me.”
“No offense, but why would a college girl like a guy in high school?”
“Why would a college girl like my dad?”
“Okay, so if she does like men who are either much too old or much too young, then what?”
“I’ll tell her what I think of her.”
At home, not even the appearance of three more silk eggs improved the mood between my mother and me as we went to the store together, sat in the cottage together, ate our canned soup together, and continued, without interest, our old sorority house ways—beds unmade, dishes unwashed, the fun of it gone because it was not a vacation but our lives.
On Thursday night, I wrote a note to Amiel, wrapped it in a plastic bag, then hid it in the underground box where I knew he would go in the morning to turn on the sprinklers in the grove.
Friday came, and I sat in the Oyster car with the windows open. Dew glazed the Icelandic poppies that held their platter faces to the gloom. Bits of morning fog fell very slowly, like petrified rain.
At the usual time, I heard the whirring of his wheels. Amiel parked his bike in the regular place, and I watched him in the rearview mirror until he retrieved the sprinkler key. Then Robby came out of his house and tossed his backpack into the car. “Are you feeling especially well grounded this morning?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, unable to see Amiel or the sprinkler key or the plastic-wrapped letter. I breathed eucalyptus air and fog.
“Guess what I’m doing tonight?” he asked, exhaling mint and Listerine.
I saw a white-shirted flicker in the darkness of the trees. I didn’t ask Robby what he was doing tonight, but he told me anyway.
“I have a le date,” he said.
Robby was not a person who dated. He was a person who received phone calls from girls and never returned them, not even if they were honor roll, flute-playing girls from Advanced Orchestra class who wanted to practice the “Shepherd’s Lament” for the state competition in Sacramento, and I would have thought he’d like those girls.
“Please tell me it’s not MBF,” I said. I was listening to what I imagined were Amiel’s feet compressing layers of sodden leaves, never turning his face to the car where we sat, his body intent on grove work. I pictured him leaning down to open the water valves, seeing the letter in the plastic bag, picking it up.
Robby said mildly, “Okay. It’s not MBF.”
My mother came rushing out of the cottage with her commuter cup, purse, and keys, and off we went, past the avocado grove, through fog that obliterated people and things. I went to school without knowing whether Amiel had found my letter, but I felt pretty sure it was MBF that Robby was dating and that Robby had moved beyond the comic-book adventures of Tintin and his little dog Snowy into a weird father-son triangle of doom.
Twenty
I won’t tell anyone anything.
I won’t bother you.
The note said these things in Spanish:
No voy a decir nada a nadie.
No voy a molestarle.
I didn’t sign my name but drew a little oyster holding a pearl—a code I’d been using with Greenie since fourth grade.
Midway through first period I became convinced that Esteban would find the letter before Amiel arrived and show it to my uncle. In second period, I imagined my uncle walking through the grove with Amiel to show him some problem or another, and they would get to the water valve and my uncle would see the bag with the note in it and pick it up. It would look much worse than it was: nothing to nobody. As if there was something big to tell.
All the time that I was thinking this and failing to write, correctly, the initials of the noble gases or compare and contrast, coherently, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” with “Because I Could Not Stop for Deat
h,” Amiel was walking through the cathedrals of the grove, picking one hard green fruit after another, the heavy canvas bag rubbing his shoulder, the mass of it when filled with avocados as heavy and hard as a human body. He was also holding my letter in his back pocket and knowing exactly one more language than I thought he knew.
English.
Twenty-one
I’ve always been suspicious of those who say, Things happen for a reason and What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Things happen all the time for no reason at all, and what doesn’t kill you scares you witless.
I got a ride home with Hickey that Friday afternoon because my mother had to stay late for a meeting, and tired of being my Siamese twin all week, she said I could go with him. “But you’d better be there when I get home at five,” she said. “With dinner prepared and the house tidied up,” she added.
Hickey and Greenie were going to a movie in Temecula and I was glad, almost, that they had an excuse not to invite me.
“Just drop me here,” I said at the bottom of my uncle’s grove. Hickey didn’t insist, and off they went, leaving me by myself at the fence. The chain link was too high to climb while wearing a backpack, so I went to the nearest locked gate and took a chance that I knew the combination. That’s how I surprised them.
Two or three Hispanic guys, none I knew by name, were sitting on wooden crates and drinking from paper cups. Not far away was an RV that one of the workers lived in with his wife and two little boys, both of whom were sitting on the steps, watching Amiel. Amiel had drawn a circle in the dirt, and in the center of the circle he was juggling four balls, and the men were saying, “¡Más! ¡Más!” and longer words I didn’t understand, though they seemed to be cheering him on. The little boys were smiling, and so was their mother, who stood just inside the open door of the RV.
Amiel bounced the balls on his chest in sequence and caught them one by one, then reached in his pocket. He held out two more balls and bowed, which made the little boys clap madly. The woman noticed me just then, and her gaze made the men turn their heads, and soon everyone, including Amiel, was staring at me.
